Saturday, 20 September 2008

'Palin' - using New Facebook Lexicon to analyse Sarah Palin's standing on Facebook

New Facebook Lexicon has launched and gives significantly more insight than the original Facebook Lexicon. New Facebook Lexicon continues to analyse Facebook Wall Posts, but now offers the chance to analyse demographics, sentiment, 'pulse', location and associations.

The following New Facebook Lexicon analysis is for Sarah Palin (analysing use of the term 'Palin' on wall posts) and provides some interesting insight:

Sentiment shows the percentage of posts that are positive vs. negative about the topic. For 'Palin' the trend is to more negative sentiment as time has progressed. At the end of August sentiment was around 80% positive and 20% negative. New Facebook Lexicon shows this has now shifted with a drop in positive sentiment to 71% and a rise in negative sentiment to 29%.

Associations plots terms that are frequently mentioned alongside the topic. The Y axis is the average age and the X axis is the average gender of users who posted the association. For example, a bubble up and to the left means that the association is more prevalent among older and more female users. A bubble down and to the right means that the association is more prevalent among younger and more male users. The size of the bubble indicates the number of times the word appeared alongside the topic in the given time window.

Men on Facebook are using 'Palin' alongside 'Biden' with older men using 'Palin' alongside the phrase 'governor.' Women have been posting 'Palin' alongside 'SNL' and 'Tina Fey.' The word 'anti' is used before 'Palin' 647 times, but the most popular association is with 'McCain' with 9499 instances:

Pulse shows keywords that frequently occur in the Profiles of users who mentioned the topic. They are ranked by how many times the keyword occurs and how closely associated the keyword is with the topic.

For 'Palin' unsurprisingly the keyword 'politics' appears most frequently, followed by 'music', 'reading', 'history' and 'travelling.'

New Facebook Lexicon Pulse for Sarah Palin (click for larger image)

Maps:

Maps shows where people are talking about the topic. The color of each area depends on how often the topic is mentioned. Darker colors indicate that more people in that region are posting about the topic per day.

New York and California have the most posts including 'Palin', however if you look at the map in terms of percentage of users posting 'Palin' then Alaska is top.

New Facebook Lexicon Maps view showing the location of the most posts with 'Palin' (click for larger image)

New Facebook Lexicon gives far more information than the original Lexicon. New Facebook Lexicon also shows that Facebook users writing wall posts using 'Palin' are mainly, young, male and live in New York or California. New Facebook Lexicon also shows that Sarah Palin's popularity is decreasing.